‘F1' review: With Brad Pitt as the seasoned old-timer, it's ‘Top Gun: Maverick' on wheels
'F1' is a pretty decent summer picture, and if it were half as crisp off the track as it is on the track, we'd really have something. But few will complain. They know what they're getting. They're getting Brad Pitt, easing his abs into tubs of ice water, and Brad Pitt striding toward the camera in long shot, twice, the way Tom Cruise did in 'Top Gun: Maverick.'
Fundamentally, it's a movie about how to get in and out of cars, and how to perfect a grizzled poseur's look of middle-distance staring into preordained destinies somewhere up in the sky. Driver Sonny Hayes, the Pitt character, survived a near-death crash 30 years earlier. He has lived a nomadic existence ever since, leaving a trail of exes and broken hearts wherever he stopped long enough to check his brakes and change the oil.
The screenplay by Ehren Kruger (co-writer on 'Top Gun: Maverick') drops hints about Sonny's gambling addict past, and his stint as a New York City cab driver, and a movie I'd see A bitter, risk-prone Formula 1 flameout, scaring the living hell out of one arrogant Wall Street trader or nightclubbing socialite after another: 'Death Cab for Snooty.'
Sonny's solitary, nomadic life gets a jolt from old pal Ruben (Javier Bardem, also very good at the getting-out-of-car-while-middle-distance-staring). Three hundred and fifty million dollars in debt, he owns an F1 team in dire need of an experienced ringer behind the wheel, someone to mentor the reckless but promising young rookie Joshua (Damson Idris). Joshua doesn't take to the fossil in their midst, dissing Sonny with insults like 'old man' and 'old timer' and 'Mr. 1990s,' and you know that sort of disrespect will come back to teach him a lesson.
'F1' travels from Dayota Beach to Abu Dhabi as the team's chances improve, in between additional near-fatal crashes and battles of the ego, plus a budding romance between Sonny and the team's technical director, Kate, played by Kerry Condon. She's a breath of fresh air in this slick, two and half hours of hero redemption, and because she's so clearly a more compelling and technically skillful screen performer than the star, Condon sometimes appears to be mentoring the guy playing the mentor.
Director Joseph Kosinski clearly took the impressive aerial reshoots (real and simulated) he oversaw in 'Maverick' as inspiration for the ground-level work on 'F1,' and there is a lot of it. The IMAX-immersive, behind-the-wheel perspectives blend with real racing footage shot from many other perspectives, along with the digital-effects amplifications, always in the name of velocity. Sonny is a brutal tactician but divinely inspired toward greatness, per the script, a driver more about ramming speed than playing nice. Some of the lines ('You're not a has-been! You're a never-was!') suggest that whenever characters peer into computer screens as they plot the next race strategy, they're secretly checking script rewrites provided by ChatGPT. Movies such as 'F1' are never described as writer's movies, which paradoxically often means many writers worked on the project. Those who received 'additional literary material' credit, though not on-screen credit, include Jez Butterworth, Aaron Sorkin and Christopher 'The Bear' Storer.
The results hang together well enough as a $200-plus million showcase for Pitt, and for Kosinski's action facility. 'F1' does, however, follow in the tradition of glossy, big-budget racing movies ('Days of Thunder,' ridiculous but under two hours, being an exception) determined to spin its wheels, dramatically speaking, 20 or 30 minutes longer than it has gas in the tank.
Also, there's a peculiar misstep in how Kosinski and editor Stephen Mirrione chop up the non-racing sequences into micro-collisions of talking heads, cutting at dangerously high speed, back and forth. It's one way to generate urgency, but is it the right way? You long to return to the racing stuff. And my favorite footage: the movie's impressively varied depictions of frenzied pit stops, three to nine seconds in duration. In an artfully packaged movie offering more teamwork lessons per lap than any racing film before it, nothing in 'F1' beats those pit stops — purely cinematic blurs of speed, noise and collaborative purpose.
'F1' — 2.5 stars (out of 4)
MPA rating: PG-13 (for strong language, and action)
Running time: 2:36
How to watch: Premieres in theaters June 26
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